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Media show lack of empathy for families of the dead
Christie Blatchford, Globe & Mail, 15 Dec 08
Article link (.pdf attached if link doesn't work)
In the triage of tragedy, recent press failures to observe the spirit of the Canadian Forces' next-of-kin notification niceties are small potatoes. After all, when Canadian soldiers are killed, it is of course the young soldiers themselves, and the loss to family and country, that matter.
But still, what has happened of late - both with the Dec. 5 roadside bomb that killed three men in Afghanistan and with the latest incident, which saw three more die in another bombing on Saturday - is revealing of a business that wrapped itself in sanctimony about the need to keep secret the kidnapping of CBC journalist Mellissa Fung, but which is considerably more cavalier when it comes to soldiers and their families.
First, a little background.
As part of the embedding arrangement with the military, reporters stationed at Kandahar Air Field agree that in the event of "a lockdown" - it's a communications lockdown, because the Internet goes down, but what we all know too well by now is that it means Canadian soldiers have died - we and our masters back in Canada will not report upon the deaths until given the green light.
There is good reason for this.
When a soldier is killed, the news travels across the chain of command and back home, a so-called "rear party" contingent - every unit overseas, whether reserve or regular force, has a rear party in Canada - swings into action and sets about physically notifying the soldier's next-of-kin.
This isn't always either easy or simple.
The notification must be done in person, for obvious reasons, and sometimes that can mean, as I recall happening one summer a couple of years ago, the rear party having to travel to a remote cottage where key family members were on holidays. It took time, because while bad news may travel fast, especially in an age of instantaneous communication, the particulars of it do not.
And though soldiers are required to fill out both a primary next-of-kin form and a secondary next-of-kin form, which usually means parents and wives or girlfriends, that doesn't begin to account for the complexities of the modern family: divorced parents who might live at opposite ends of the country, step-parents and half-siblings, brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts and uncles, let alone friends.
In the Dec. 5 blast that killed Private Demetrios Diplaros, Corporal Mark Robert McLaren and Warrant Officer Robert John Wilson, all of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, based in Petawawa, Ont., news first leaked out about new casualties during a briefing in Washington conducted by a U.S. military official.
Because the leak came from outside Kandahar, via an affiliated military, reporting it wouldn't technically be a breach of the embedding agreement for a Canadian news organization, and one went ahead and did just that.
News of the latest Canadian casualties had already made its way to the military grapevine on Saturday, when Cpl. McLaren was being buried in Peterborough, Ont.
A photographer covering that funeral heard soldiers talking about it, told his paper, which inquired of the military and then apparently agreed to embargo the information for another five hours, giving the rear parties a bit more time to notify all who should be notified.
Again, because the news leak didn't come from the organization's people in Kandahar (as with many news organizations, that paper has no one in Afghanistan), but rather from soldiers (albeit ones heard talking at a friend's funeral), this wasn't seen as a technical breach of the understanding between the military and news media.
And sure enough, once the negotiated extra five hours had passed but before all the notifications had been made, the military was effectively forced to release the names of the dead: Privates John Michael Roy Curwin and Justin Peter Jones; and Corporal Thomas James Hamilton, all with the 2nd Battalion, RCR, out of CFB Gagetown - before everyone who should have been told had been told.
In fact, the earliest of these reports, on a Canadian television website, preceded the release of the soldiers' names and simply reported that Canada had suffered more casualties, a nifty way to strike fear in the hearts of all soldierly parents who might have been perusing that website. "The military is not releasing the soldiers' names until all the next of kin are notified, but close family members have been informed of their deaths," this story said. Another story, done after the names had been released, referred to a Department of National Defence press release that said "primary next of kin of the deceased soldiers have been notified."
In other words, these organizations knew full well when they ran these stories that the notification process wasn't complete, and that there were Canadians out there who could learn from the tube, radio or website that someone they loved had been killed.
I don't know whether that actually happened this time - I hope not - but the potential was certainly there, and for what? A website scoop that might have lasted mere minutes?
Compare this casual attitude with the very careful handling of Ms. Fung's ordeal. Kidnapped in Kabul on Oct. 12, the 35-year-old journalist was held captive for 28 days, during which Canadian (and other) news organizations released not a word out of concern for her safety. And while the debate - to publish or not - sparked in newsrooms what my colleague Les Perreaux once described as "hand-wringing on an international level," mum was the word.
The situation with the soldiers is not perfectly comparable, of course, in that they conveniently already were dead, and it was only a question of whether everyone in their families had been told, or not. But at the least it reveals an empathy deficit within Canadian newsrooms, unless, of course, the affected is one of our own.
Media show lack of empathy for families of the dead
Christie Blatchford, Globe & Mail, 15 Dec 08
Article link (.pdf attached if link doesn't work)
In the triage of tragedy, recent press failures to observe the spirit of the Canadian Forces' next-of-kin notification niceties are small potatoes. After all, when Canadian soldiers are killed, it is of course the young soldiers themselves, and the loss to family and country, that matter.
But still, what has happened of late - both with the Dec. 5 roadside bomb that killed three men in Afghanistan and with the latest incident, which saw three more die in another bombing on Saturday - is revealing of a business that wrapped itself in sanctimony about the need to keep secret the kidnapping of CBC journalist Mellissa Fung, but which is considerably more cavalier when it comes to soldiers and their families.
First, a little background.
As part of the embedding arrangement with the military, reporters stationed at Kandahar Air Field agree that in the event of "a lockdown" - it's a communications lockdown, because the Internet goes down, but what we all know too well by now is that it means Canadian soldiers have died - we and our masters back in Canada will not report upon the deaths until given the green light.
There is good reason for this.
When a soldier is killed, the news travels across the chain of command and back home, a so-called "rear party" contingent - every unit overseas, whether reserve or regular force, has a rear party in Canada - swings into action and sets about physically notifying the soldier's next-of-kin.
This isn't always either easy or simple.
The notification must be done in person, for obvious reasons, and sometimes that can mean, as I recall happening one summer a couple of years ago, the rear party having to travel to a remote cottage where key family members were on holidays. It took time, because while bad news may travel fast, especially in an age of instantaneous communication, the particulars of it do not.
And though soldiers are required to fill out both a primary next-of-kin form and a secondary next-of-kin form, which usually means parents and wives or girlfriends, that doesn't begin to account for the complexities of the modern family: divorced parents who might live at opposite ends of the country, step-parents and half-siblings, brothers and sisters, cousins and aunts and uncles, let alone friends.
In the Dec. 5 blast that killed Private Demetrios Diplaros, Corporal Mark Robert McLaren and Warrant Officer Robert John Wilson, all of the 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, based in Petawawa, Ont., news first leaked out about new casualties during a briefing in Washington conducted by a U.S. military official.
Because the leak came from outside Kandahar, via an affiliated military, reporting it wouldn't technically be a breach of the embedding agreement for a Canadian news organization, and one went ahead and did just that.
News of the latest Canadian casualties had already made its way to the military grapevine on Saturday, when Cpl. McLaren was being buried in Peterborough, Ont.
A photographer covering that funeral heard soldiers talking about it, told his paper, which inquired of the military and then apparently agreed to embargo the information for another five hours, giving the rear parties a bit more time to notify all who should be notified.
Again, because the news leak didn't come from the organization's people in Kandahar (as with many news organizations, that paper has no one in Afghanistan), but rather from soldiers (albeit ones heard talking at a friend's funeral), this wasn't seen as a technical breach of the understanding between the military and news media.
And sure enough, once the negotiated extra five hours had passed but before all the notifications had been made, the military was effectively forced to release the names of the dead: Privates John Michael Roy Curwin and Justin Peter Jones; and Corporal Thomas James Hamilton, all with the 2nd Battalion, RCR, out of CFB Gagetown - before everyone who should have been told had been told.
In fact, the earliest of these reports, on a Canadian television website, preceded the release of the soldiers' names and simply reported that Canada had suffered more casualties, a nifty way to strike fear in the hearts of all soldierly parents who might have been perusing that website. "The military is not releasing the soldiers' names until all the next of kin are notified, but close family members have been informed of their deaths," this story said. Another story, done after the names had been released, referred to a Department of National Defence press release that said "primary next of kin of the deceased soldiers have been notified."
In other words, these organizations knew full well when they ran these stories that the notification process wasn't complete, and that there were Canadians out there who could learn from the tube, radio or website that someone they loved had been killed.
I don't know whether that actually happened this time - I hope not - but the potential was certainly there, and for what? A website scoop that might have lasted mere minutes?
Compare this casual attitude with the very careful handling of Ms. Fung's ordeal. Kidnapped in Kabul on Oct. 12, the 35-year-old journalist was held captive for 28 days, during which Canadian (and other) news organizations released not a word out of concern for her safety. And while the debate - to publish or not - sparked in newsrooms what my colleague Les Perreaux once described as "hand-wringing on an international level," mum was the word.
The situation with the soldiers is not perfectly comparable, of course, in that they conveniently already were dead, and it was only a question of whether everyone in their families had been told, or not. But at the least it reveals an empathy deficit within Canadian newsrooms, unless, of course, the affected is one of our own.
